• The answers are well thought out
• The answers are written in plain English instead of usability speak
• People are encouraged to ask questions
• There isn’t too much content

Very cool.

Then try out ClickTale, a new analytics tool that I test drove a month ago.

ClickTale gives you a good idea of what your users are doing so you can correct site issues fast. It records complete sessions, allows you to throttle usage so you don’t record every session, and gives you those nifty heat maps that wow and amaze executives.

The price is about right — $99 a month gets you started — but the only complaint I have is that their freemium levels don’t give you enough of a taste of what the tool can do (really, I need a better idea if the heat maps are worth it.

Enter Attention Wizard. Attention Wizard is a tool that shows possible eye tracking without the human part. The smart folks over at Site Tuners (Thanks Tim, for the invite) have written an algorithm that produces an “attention heatmap”, a way of saying here’s some possible areas that the users are paying attention to based on color and Gestalt theory. All you have to do is upload a screen shot, and in five minutes, it gives you results of what it could look like.

I did it with Online Marketing Summit (click on the thumbnail) to show you what one of their results are.

Their sales points

• Can be used with actual screenshots or page design mock-ups
• Instant results – no eye-movement or mouse-tracking data collection needed
• Tells you what people are paying attention to, and what they ignore
• Easily identify landing page problems & increase your conversion rates

Our take aways

• People’s eyes go right to the schedule tab, which is a good thing.
• We have this photo image in the first paragraph of text that does nothing. It’s providing no value to the user while attracting a lot of attention.
• The testimonials are getting a lot of attention.
• I think Attention Wizard is giving too much weight to the photo.
• Overall, the eye is scanning the page well.

We’re going to make more changes, but the goal is to get results quickly and increase conversion rate on the site, and that’s what we got with Attention Wizard.

My honest opinion about Attention Wizard?

I wouldn’t take this as gospel science (is eye tracking that now, anyways?), but it’s a good first cut at “well, let’s see what we have.” They claim a 75 percent rate of matching eye and mouse tracking, and that’s good enough for me. It’s much better to do several tests with this tool (which would be great as a subscription model site) than spending $5,000 for an eye tracking system that no one’s going use because, well, it’s hard to use.

It’s a great tool that’s only going to get better once they work out the kinks.

“The Twitpocalypse is similar to the Y2K bug. Very soon the unique identifier associated to each tweet will exceed 2,147,483,6471

For some of your favorite third-party Twitter services not designed to handle such a case, the sequence will suddenly turn into negative numbers. At this point, they are very likely to malfunction or crash.

When will this happen? Check here often, and we will tell you how close we are to the Twitpocalypse.”

Props out to ShortFormBlog for finding this one.

Their manifesto:

We are Caroline and Micah, the founders of The League. As designers on the web, we have a calling to raise the standards of the web-design world. We’re not the only ones who value good design, and it’s time for the web world to catch up with it. We understand the challenges that comes with the internet, but with our recent discovery of @font-face, we started getting excited. For those who aren’t up to speed, @font-face is a fairly new addition to web styling, letting a designer specify the location of their own font files. Instead of having to design with just a handful of web-friendly fonts, we’ll be able to use any typeface we desire. Well, that’s our vision, anyway.

Wufoo is a very effective and easy to use form building tool that allows normal people (i.e. marketing managers and other non-techies) to build web forms quickly and easily without knowing programming. The form entries are collected in a database, and can be exported out to Microsoft Excel.

Or, isn’t Excel the marketing manager’s best friend?

You can have your designers make design changes with a CSS editing area, but the forms are designed to be very usable (I was impressed), and for short term form management, this is a great tool. For a longer term project, it’s better to go with custom programming.

Jakob Nielsen probably thought it was 99 percent bad.

Writing less. Saying more.

I can never say Infragistics right, but they produce top notch controls for the ASP.NET world. Now they have something else that is way cool: Quince, a great little directory of user interface patterns that is built using SilverLight. J. Ambrose Little, a User Experience guy over there, wrote an extensive blog post about the new tool.

You can navigate through different patterns four different ways (I find user tasks especially useful), search them via keyword, and sort through them by letter. Very, very easy to use.

The best part? If you have a design pattern you want to submit, you can do it through the site, and the Infragistics team will review it and post it. It’s got all the requisite social networking tools with it!

Most of the company sites I’ve been designing have been fairly static. For new ideas, I’ve been popping over to Template Monster. They have pages and pages of ideas, and if you want to pick one, the designs are fairly cheap, usually around $70. Not bad, considering you get the PSD file to start from.

I wonder when there’s going to be an Information Architecture Monster.

What would you do for a whopper? This is a great application for Facebook and website that creates some fun in exchange for free food. I don’t know if it will result in extra sales, but this is exactly a fun way to attach a reward component to social networking.

And, it’s been very successful from an awareness standpoint (Other posts at The Future of Ads, Inside Facebook). What do you think?

Talk about proper branding, Cosmic Motors is cool.

The site everything from the number of interviews that John McCain and Barack Obama have done (
2,077,765) to projections after projections after projections. It ain’t fancy, but it’s very usable.

Do your part.

Vote. Then visit this site.

I really don’t like driving. Really. That’s why I live in Los Angeles (actually, Long Beach). I try to take public transportation when possible, which is almost impossible where I live, save the occasional trip to Belmont Shore.

If you don’t like driving and want to get moving without a car, use Google Transit. They aren’t supporting every city yet, but they have Los Angeles and Orange County, which alone shocks me.

All I did was enter in the address I started at, where I wanted to go, and Google did the rest: suggest several locations of “Did you mean?”, showed my alternate routes, and which bus routes I would have to take. 

What is amazing about the tie in to their massive search database is that you don’t even have to enter in addresses; you can enter in a business name, it will show you a number of options (say, a restaurant, or your workplace). It also supports multimodal transportation, like going from subway to bus to train in New York City, elegantly.

And…

(I know, it’s been around for a while, but it’s still nifty…)

If you want to see something really cool, try the SilverLight version of the paper. It’s slick because it downloads the paper local, so you can read it offline. If looks like the real version of the New York Times, complete with the type, and if you resize the window, it resizes the article and the number of columns.

It automatically syncs when online like RSS Feeds, and the advertisements are overly obtrusive. It’s not free (and I’m a firm believer that all content shouldn’t be free) but at $15 a month, is cheaper than getting the paper delivered.

Would you pay $15 a month for this service?

It does look pretty slick, but Windows-only for this first Beta. But a slick UI doesn’t not a new platform make, kids.

That’s a hoot.

F*** me dead I just opened mine eyes, and lo! I have not updated this since I fell in love. You would not believe that I actually have a life. Jealous much? Don’t be, it was very painful.

I am recuperating with drinking a lot of water, playing The Sims, just generally being a coach to the local soccer team, my day lasts forever from 4:55am to till I fall into bed at midnight. I am so over it. I need a holiday.

I wish one day I will have time to blog again. One day I will find my magic genie! I keep looking, anyway!

Let’s put it this way — it’s perfect for an evening at SFO.

Very cool.

How it works:

• Pay the $29.95 membership fee and get a card in the mail
• Pre-purchase gas at a certain price
• Use the card at any of the 200,000 participating stations in the network

The site is fairly usable, but when I checked it, there was no place to look for locations near me, but I was able to check out how much I would save. I haven’t been driving a lot lately, but they estimated my savings at $400 a year. That’s ironically just about what I would set down at a blackjack table in Las Vegas, so I don’t see it as that much of a savings.

But if you want to hedge your bets, this is the place to go.

Yelp! is a social network-y review site (okay, it’s about adding friends and comments, but that’s how most social networking sites define it, whatever) that contains thousands of reviews, mostly of local businesses. Need a lousy hotel in Anchorage? It’s there! A great restaurant in Tempe to get drunk at? It’s there!

They have all kinds of nifty widgets to add to your blog.

One lament — how about opening up a Canadian site, yo. I have a bunch of restaurants to review up there.

You can submit ideas, and other users can vote and comment on the ideas. From that, the ideas are submitted to Starbucks management. On the blog, the management actually asks for feedback on how to implement the idea, and if the idea is good and gets a great rating, the management gives credit to the users (what they should be doing is sending them at least a Starbucks for some kind of reward system).

More importantly, it allows Starbucks to evangelize to their customers, and build a devout customer base. There’s nothing better than empowering your customers to do your advertising for you.

Some of the suggested ideas are better recycling options, healthier food suggestions, and how to get people to refill their starbucks cards to save the environment.

Enter GlassDoor, the new entry into the “review your company” sweepstakes. It has a bunch of me too features, but the site is much easier to use (sooner or later they’ll have to add advertising), and there are a bunch of contextual searches.

The most intriguing feature is the salary ranges for each company. Boy, that’s going to make some companies uneasy.

Enter Kayak. One of the best examples of Web 2.0 design, it’s simple, offers my options to change my search on the fly, and it’s fast. I love the site. I don’t know how they make their money, because sometimes I book somewhere else, but whatever they are doing, keep it up.

One of the best features is when you click on a profile, you can see all of the representatives for that person. Very cool.

Music fans on SellaBand invest 10 dollars in an artist they want to back. If the artist gets to 5,000 ‘believers’ they get 50,000 dollars and then SellaBand steps in to get the band to record an album in a real studio. Each fan gets a limited edition CD. If the artist doesn’t reach $50,000, the fans can get their money back or give it to another artist.

Visit the site — cool idea. Another way for bands to make it big.

(By the way, I purchased a limited edition album from Mandy Leigh — good stuff, and I used to review music a long time ago, so my opinion counts. You should buy it too).